1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to cooling of the electronic or telecommunications equipment and more particularly to a thermal management plate useful for mounting printed circuit board assemblies as well as providing heat dissipation.
2. Background Art
Historically, telecommunications and similar electronic equipment has been free convection cooled. Although the amount of heat that can be dissipated is relatively low, this has been acceptable because power dissipation densities typically were very low.
With increased power densities, forced convection (fan) cooling was introduced. Though satisfactory equipment cooling is provided by the forced convection method, this method has a number of drawbacks. These drawbacks include cost, being added in the form of fans, their necessary mounting hardware and the required failure detection circuitry that must be provided. The reliability of fans must be considered and accordingly appropriate maintenance techniques must be developed. Beacuse of the questionable reliability of fan devices, fan failure detection and alarm equipment must be provided if system degradation can result if and when a fan failure occurs. Finally, in many instances, acoustic noise is generated by the fan type devices and in many office environments such noise may be considered objectionable.
With the rapid expansion of miniaturization techniques in the electronics field, electronic systems have been constructed utilizing smaller and smaller components. While these components are smaller they individually dissipate more power than many of the larger components previously utilized. Thus, a desirable trend is to form the assembly of the printed circuit board and its related components with an arrangement that mounts and interconnects these components to provide a thermally conductive plane as an integral part of the unit. Accordingly it is the object of the present invention to provide a thermal management plate that allows the thermal coefficient of expansion of the component and its mountings to be matched as well as to improve local thermal management at a high power density device by conducting heat away from it.